"the fringe" has
flitted from the masculine to the feminine brow; and now that it is
"crinkled" no longer claims to be a badge of superior sanctity. In one
of these Dopper churches the Rev. W. Frost long conducted Wesleyan
services, the crowding troops having made our own church far too
small.

The other, on the occasion of my first visit, was occupied by Canon
Knox Little, who there conducted the Anglican parade service, and
preached with great fervour from the very pulpit whence, some months
before, President Kruger had delivered a discourse presumably of a
decidedly different type. But the Wesleyan church immediately
adjoining the camping ground of the 2nd Coldstream battalion, which I
had the privilege that day of reopening, was at a later period used
for a brief while by the Roman Catholic chaplains. War is a strange
revolutionist if not always a reformer.

[Sidenote: _August Bank Holiday._]

The next day, which was August Bank Holiday, I returned in safety to
Brugspruit, but only to discover that in those parts even railway
travelling had become a thing of deadly peril. I there saw two trains
just arrived from Pretoria, the trucks filled with remount horses and
cavalry men on their way to join General French's force. The first
engine bore three bullet holes in its encasing water tank, holes which
the driver had hastily plugged with wood, so preventing the loss of
all his water and the fatal stoppage of the train. Several of the
trucks were riddled with bullet-holes, and in one I saw a dead horse,
shot, lying under the feet of its comrades; while in another truck,
splashed with great clots of blood, similarly lay yet another horse
almost dead. Several more were wounded but still remained upon their
feet, and still had before them a journey of many miles ere their
wounds could receive attention, or the living be severed from the
dead. For horses this has been a specially fagging and fatal war, and
for them there are no well-earned medals!

The second engine bore kindred bullet holes in its water tank. A shot
had smashed the glass in the window of the break-van in which some
officers were travelling; and in one of the trucks I was shown a hole
in the thick timber made by a bullet, which, after passing through two
inches of wood, had pierced a lancer's breast and killed him, besides
shattering the wrist of yet another lancer. Those trains had just been
fired at by a mounted Boer patrol which had caught our men l